Holly

July 24, 2021

Holly arrives at Meadowbrook Estates forty-five minutes before the time she and Counselor Emerson agreed on. Holly is early for everything, Uncle Henry liked to say. She’ll be early to her own funeral. For that one she’ll probably be right on time—no choice—but she signed on to her mother’s Zoom funeral fifteen minutes early, which more or less proves Uncle Henry’s point.

She doesn’t go directly to the house but stops on the corner of Hancock Street, keeping an eye on the step van parked in her late mother’s driveway. The van is bright red except for the company name on the side: A.D. CLEANING, in yellow. As the owner and chief sleuth (gumshoe, hawkshaw, dick, and keyhole-peeper are less dignified terms) of a private investigation company, Holly has seen such vans a time or two before. A.D. stands for After Death.

In this case they will only be vacuuming and wiping down every surface with disinfectant (must not neglect the light switches, flush handles, even the door hinges). After violent deaths, and after the police forensic units have done their work, the A.D. crew comes in to clean up blood and vomit, cart away broken furniture, and of course fumigate. The last is particularly important when it comes to meth labs. Holly might actually know one or two members of this crew, but she doesn’t want to see or talk to them. She rolls down her window, lights a cigarette, and waits.

At ten-forty, two A.D. employees come out with their bulky cases slung over their shoulders. They are wearing gloves, coveralls, and masks. Regular N95s, not the gas masks sometimes necessary after violent deaths. The lady in this house died of so-called natural causes, and in the hospital, so it’s strictly a Covid wipedown, easy-peasy, quick in and quick out. They exchange a nod. One of them tapes an envelope—red, like the step van—to the front door. They hop in their van and drive away. Holly reflexively lowers her head as they go by.

She puts her cigarette butt in her traveling ashtray (freshly cleaned that morning but already containing three dead soldiers) and drives down to 42 Lily Court, the house her mother bought six years ago. She pulls the envelope off the door and opens it. The enclosed sheets of paper (only two; following a suicide or murder there would have been many more) detail the services performed. The last line reads ITEMS REMOVED: 0. Holly believes that, and David Emerson must also have believed it. A.D. has been around for years, they’re bonded, their reputation in this less than pleasant but utterly necessary field is impeccable… and besides, what did her mother have to steal? Her dozens of china figurines, including the Pillsbury Doughboy and the leering Pinocchio that used to give Holly the horrors as a little girl?

For a millionaire she lived cheap, Holly thinks. This awakens feelings that aren’t a part of her usual emotional spectrum. Resentment? Yes, but mostly it’s anger and disappointment.

She thinks, The daughter of a liar walks into a bar and orders a mai-tai.

Of course a mai-tai. On the rare occasions when she orders a drink, that’s the one Holly orders because it makes her think of palm trees, turquoise water, and white sand beaches. Sometimes in bed at night (not often, but sometimes) she imagines a bronze lifeguard in tight bathing trunks sitting up on his tower. He looks at her and smiles and what follows, follows.

Holly has her key, but she has no urge to go in and see that china Pinocchio with his Alpine hat and his leering little smile that says I know all about your fantasy lifeguard, Holly. I know how you dig your fingernails into his back when you—

“When I come, so what, who cares,” she mutters as she sits on the step to wait for the lawyer.

In her mind, her mother replies, sad as always when her untalented and unglamorous daughter fails to come up to the mark: Oh, Holly.

Time to open the door, not to the house but in her mind. To think about what happened and why it happened. She supposes she already knows. She’s a detective, after all.

Elizabeth Wharton, mother of Olivia Trelawney and Janelle “Janey” Patterson, died. Holly met Bill Hodges at the old lady’s funeral. He came with Janey, and he was kind. He treated Holly—gasp!—as a regular person. She had not been a regular person, isn’t a regular person now, but she’s closer to regular than she was. Thanks to Bill.

Janey died after that funeral. Brady Hartsfield blew her up. And Holly—a forty-something lonely woman with no friends, living at home with her mother—actually helped to catch Brady… although as it turned out, Brady wasn’t done with any of them. Not with Bill, not with Holly, not with Jerome and Barbara Robinson.

It was Bill who convinced her she could be her own person. He never said it out loud. He never had to. It was all in the way he treated her. He gave her responsibilities and simply assumed she would fulfill them. Charlotte didn’t like that. Didn’t like him. Holly barely noticed. Her mother’s cautions and disapprovals became background noise. When she was working with Bill, she felt alive and smart and useful. Color came back into the world. After Brady there was another case to chase, another bad guy to go after, Morris Bellamy by name. Morris was looking for buried treasure and willing to do anything to get it.

Then…

“Bill got sick,” Holly murmurs, lighting a fresh cigarette. “Pancreatic.”

It still hurts to think of that, even five years later.

There was another will, and Holly discovered Bill had left her the company. Finders Keepers. It hadn’t been much, not then. Nascent. Struggling to get on its feet.

And me struggling to stay on mine, Holly thinks. Because Bill would have been disappointed if I fell down. Disappointed in me.

It was around then—she can’t remember exactly, but it had to be not long after Bill passed—that Charlotte called her in tears and told her the dastardly Daniel Hailey had scarpered off to the Caribbean with the millions Janey had left to her and to Henry. Also with most of Holly’s trust fund, which she had thrown into the pot at her mother’s urging.

There was a family meeting where Charlotte kept saying things like I can’t forgive myself, I’ll never be able to forgive myself. And Henry kept telling her it was all right, that they both still had enough to live on. Holly did as well, he said, although she might consider giving up her apartment and living on Lily Court with her mother for awhile. Taking up residence in the guest room, in other words, where her mother had more or less replicated Holly’s childhood room. Like a museum exhibit, Holly thinks.

Had Uncle Henry really said easy come, easy go at that meeting? Sitting on the step, smoking her cigarette, Holly can’t remember for sure, but she thinks he did. Which he could say, because the money actually hadn’t gone anywhere. Not his, not Charlotte’s, not Holly’s.

And of course you’ll have to close the business, Charlotte had said. That Holly can remember. Oh yes. Because that was the purpose of it all, wasn’t it? To put a stop to her fragile daughter’s crazy plan to run a private detective agency, an idea put into her head by the man who had almost gotten her killed.

“To get me back under her thumb,” Holly whispers, and mashes her cigarette out so hard that sparks fly up and bite the back of her hand.

She’s thinking about lighting another one when Elaine from next door and Danielle from across the street come over to tell her how sorry they are for her loss. They both attended the funeral. Neither are wearing masks, and they exchange an amused look (an oh, Holly look for sure) when Holly quickly pulls hers up. Elaine asks if she’s going to list the house for sale. Holly says probably. Danielle asks if she is perhaps thinking of having a yard sale. Holly says probably not. She’s feeling the onset of a headache.

That’s when Emerson pulls up in his no-nonsense Chevrolet. A Honda Civic parks behind him, two women inside. Emerson is also early, only by five minutes or so, but thank God. Danielle and Elaine head off to Danielle’s house, chatting away, exchanging gossip plus whatever invisible creepy-crawlies might or might not be colonizing their respiratory systems.

The women who exit the Honda are roughly Holly’s age, Emerson quite a bit older, sporting showy white wings on the sides of his swept-back hair. He’s tall and cadaverous, with dark circles under his eyes that suggest to Holly either insomnia or an iron deficiency. He’s toting a very lawyerly briefcase. She’s glad to see all three are wearing no-frills N95 masks, and instead of his hand, he offers an elbow. She gives it a light bump. Each of the women raises a hand in greeting.

“Pleased to meet you face to face, Holly—may I call you Holly?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And I’m David. This is Rhoda Landry, and the pretty lady next to her is Andrea Stark. They work for me. Rhoda’s my notary. Have you been inside yet?”

“No. I was waiting for you.” Did not want to face Pinocchio and the Pillsbury Doughboy alone, she thinks. It’s a joke, but like many jokes it’s also true.

“Very kind,” he says, although why it would be Holly doesn’t know. “Would you like to do the honors?”

She uses her key, the one her mother gave to her with great ceremony, telling her for goodness sake take care of it, don’t lose it like the library book you left on the bus. The library book in question, A Day No Pigs Would Die, was recovered from the bus company’s lost and found the next day, but Charlotte was still bringing it up three years later. And later still. At sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one, in her fifties, God save the Queen, it was still remember the time you lost that library book on the bus? Always with the rueful laugh that said Oh, Holly.

The smell of potpourri hits her as soon as the door is open. For a moment she hesitates—nothing brings back memories, both good and bad, so strongly as certain aromas—but then she squares her shoulders and steps inside.

“What a nice little place,” Rhoda Landry says. “I love a Cape Cod.”

“Cozy,” Andrea Stark adds. Why she’s here Holly doesn’t know.

“I’ve got some things for you to look over and a few papers for you to sign,” Emerson says. “The most important is an acknowledgement that you have been informed of the bequest. One copy of that goes to the IRS and one to County Probate. Would the kitchen work for you? That’s where Charlotte and I did most of our business.”

Into the kitchen they go, Emerson already fumbling with the catches of his briefcase, the two women looking around and taking inventory, as women are apt to do in a house that isn’t their own. Holly is also looking around, and hearing her mother everywhere her eyes stop. Her mother’s voice, always starting with how many times have I told you.

The sink: How many times have I told you to never put a juice glass in the dishwasher until you rinse it?

The refrigerator: How many times have I told you to make sure the door is closed tight?

The cupboards: How many times have I told you to never put away more than three plates at a time if you don’t want them to chip?

The stove: How many times have I told you to double-check that everything is off before you leave the kitchen?

They sit at the table. Emerson gives her the papers he needs her to sign, one by one. There’s the acknowledgement that she has been informed of the bequest. There’s an acknowledgement that she has been provided a copy of Charlotte Anne Gibney’s last will and testament (which Emerson gives her now). There’s the acknowledgement that she has been informed of her mother’s various investment assets, which include a very valuable stock portfolio, Tesla and Apple shares being the pick of the litter. Holly signs an employment agreement authorizing David Emerson to represent her in probate court. Rhoda Landry notarizes each document with her big old stamping gadget, and Andrea Stark witnesses them (so that’s what she’s here for).

When the signing ritual is done, the women offer Holly murmured condolences and make their exit. Emerson tells Holly he’d be happy to take her to lunch, except for his pending appointment. Holly tells him that’s perfectly fine. She doesn’t want to eat with Emerson; what she wants is to see the back of him. Her headache is getting worse, and she wants a cigarette. Craves one, actually.

“Now that you’ve had some time to think about it, are you still leaning toward selling the house?”

“Yes.” Not just leaning, either.

“With furnishings or without? Have you thought about that?”

“With.”

“Still…” From his briefcase he takes a small stack of red tags. Printed on them is SAVE. “If you find there are things you want after going through the place, you can put these tags on them. Just peel off the back, you see?”

“Yes.”

“For instance, your mother’s china figurines in the front hall, you might want those as keepsakes…” He sees her face. “Or perhaps not, but there might be other things. Probably will be. Based on my previous experience in such cases, legatees often let things go they later wish they had held onto.”

You believe that, Holly thinks. You believe it to your very soul, because you’re a holder-onner, and holder-onners are never able to understand let-goers. They are tribes that just can’t understand each other. Sort of like vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, Trumpers and Never Trumpers.

“I understand.”

He smiles, perhaps believing he’s convinced her. “The last thing is this.”

He takes a slim folder from his briefcase. It contains photographs. He spreads them out before her like a cop laying out a perp gallery for a witness. She views them with amazement. It’s not perps she’s looking at but jewelry lying on swatches of dark cloth. Earrings, finger rings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, a double string of pearls.

“Your mother insisted I take these for safekeeping before she went to the hospital,” Emerson says. “A bit irregular, but it was her wish. They’re yours now, or will be once Charlotte’s will is probated.” He hands her a sheet of paper. “Here’s the inventory.”

She glances at it briefly. Charlotte has signed, Emerson has co-signed, and Andrea Stark—whose job description, apparently, is Professional Witness—has also signed. Holly looks back at the photos and taps two of them. “This is my mother’s wedding ring, and this is her engagement ring, which she hardly ever wore, but I don’t recognize any of this other stuff.”

“She seems to have been quite the collector,” Emerson says. He sounds a bit uncomfortable, but really not very. Death reveals secrets. Surely he knows this. He has been, as they say, around the block a few times.

“But…” Holly stares at him. She thought—hoped—she was prepared for this meeting, even for touring her dead mother’s house and the museum exhibit guest room, but this? No. “Is it valuable or costume?”

“You’ll have to have it appraised to determine the value,” Emerson says. He hesitates, then adds something less lawyerly. “But according to Andrea, it’s not costume.”

Holly doesn’t reply. What she’s thinking is that this goes beyond deceit. Maybe beyond forgiveness.

“I’ll continue to hold these pieces in the firm’s safe until the will is probated, but you should keep this. I have a copy.” He means the inventory. There have to be at least three dozen items on it, and if those are real gems, the total value must be… Jesus, a lot. A hundred thousand dollars? Two hundred thousand? Five?

Under the patient tutelage of Bill Hodges, she has trained her mind to follow certain facts and not flinch when they lead to certain conclusions. Here is one fact: Charlotte apparently had jewelry worth a great deal of money. Here is another: Holly has never seen her mother wearing any of said sparklers; did not even know they existed. Conclusion: At some point following her mother’s inheritance, and probably after the money had supposedly been lost, Charlotte became a secret hoarder, like a cave-bound goblin in a fantasy story.

Holly sees him to the door. He looks at the china figurines and smiles. “My wife loves stuff like this,” he says. “I think she’s got every gnome and pixie-sitting-on-a-mushroom ever made.”

“Take a few for her,” Holly says. Take them all.

Emerson looks alarmed. “Oh, I couldn’t. No. Thank you, but no.”

“At least take this one.” She picks up the hateful Pinocchio and slaps it into his palm with a smile. “I’m sure the estate is paying you—”

“Of course—”

“But take this from me. For your kindness.”

“If you insist—”

“I do,” Holly says. Seeing that poopy little long-nosed fucker going away will be the best thing that’s happened to her since arriving at 42 Lily Court.

Closing the door and watching through the window as Emerson goes to his car, Holly thinks, Lies. So many lies.

Holly goes back to the kitchen and gathers up her copies of the legal papers. Feeling like a woman in a dream—a new millionaire walks into a bar, so on and so on—she goes to the second drawer to the left of the sink, where there are still Baggies, aluminum foil, Saran wrap, bread ties (her mother never threw them away), and other assorted rickrack. She roots around until she finds a big plastic chip clip and attaches it to the papers. Then she takes a teacup—HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS printed on the side—back to the table. Her mother never allowed smoking in the house; Holly used to do it in her bathroom with the window open. Now she lights up, feeling both residual guilt and a certain naughty pleasure.

Once she sat at a table very like this one, in her parents’ house on Bond Street in Cincinnati, filling out college applications: one to UCLA, one to NYU, one to Duke. Those were her dream choices, worth every penny of the application fees. Places far away from Walnut Hills High, where she had never been known as Jibba-Jibba. Away from her mother, father, and Uncle Henry, too.

She was accepted at none of them, of course. Her grades were strictly mediocre and her SATs were abysmal, possibly because the day she took them she had a migraine headache up top and menstrual cramps down below, both probably brought on by stress. The only acceptance she got was from State U, which was not surprising. Getting accepted at State was like striking out the pitcher in a baseball game. And even from State there was no offer of scholarship help.

Your father and I certainly can’t afford to send you and you’d be paying a loan back until you’re forty, Charlotte said. Back then it was probably true. And if you flunked out you’d still owe the money. The subtext being that of course Holly would flunk out; college would be just too much pressure for such a fragile child. Hadn’t Charlotte once found Holly curled up in the tub, refusing to go to school? And look what happened after she took the SATs! Came home, had a crying jag, spent half the night throwing up!

Holly ended up working for Mitchell Fine Homes and Estates and taking community college classes at night. Most of them were computer science courses, although she snuck in an English class or two. All was going pretty well—she was often unhappy, but had come to accept that, like a birthmark or a turned-in foot—until Frank Mitchell, Jr., the boss’s son, began to bother her.

“Bother my fanny!” Holly tells the empty kitchen. “He hounded me! For sex!”

When she told her mother some of what was going on at the office, Charlotte advised her to laugh it off. Men were men, she said, went through life following their peckers, and they never changed. Coping with them wasn’t pleasant, but it was part of life, you had to take the bitter with the sweet, what could not be cured must be endured, so on and so on.

Dad’s not that way, Holly had said, to which her mother waved one hand in an airy gesture of dismissal that said of course he’s not and he wouldn’t dare and I’d like to see him try it. A lot to convey in a simple hand gesture, but Charlotte had managed.

What Holly didn’t tell her was that she had almost given in, had almost given the bulgy-eyed trout-faced son of a so-and-so what he wanted. Nobody likes you here, Junior Mitchell said. You’re standoffish and you do substandard work. Without me you’d be out on your ass. So how about a little payback, huh? I think once you try it, you’ll like it.

They went into his office, and Junior started to unbutton her blouse. The first button… the second… the third… and then she slapped him, a real roundhouse, putting everything she had into it, knocking his glasses off and making his lip bleed. He called her a useless bitch and said he could get her arrested for assault. Gathering courage she hadn’t known she possessed, speaking in a coldly certain voice that sounded nothing like her usual one (which was so quiet that people often had to ask her to repeat herself), she told him that if he tried that, when the police came she’d tell them he tried to rape her. And something in his face—a kind of instinctive grimace—made her think that the police might believe her side of the story, because Frank Jr. had been in trouble before. Trouble of this sort. In any case, that was the end of it. For him, at least. Not for Holly, who came in early one day a week later, trashed his office, then curled up in her shitty little cubicle with her head on her desk. She would have crawled under the desk, but there wasn’t room.

A month in a “treatment center” followed (her parents had found money enough for that), then three years of counseling. The counseling ended when her father died, but she continued to take various medications which left her functional but seeing the world as if through a cellophane wrapper.

What cannot be cured must be endured: the gospel according to Charlotte Gibney.

Holly puts out her cigarette under the tap, rinses the teacup, sets it in the drainer, and goes upstairs. The first door on the right is the guest room. Except not really. The wallpaper’s wrong, for one thing, but it’s still creepily like the room she lived in as a teenager in Cincinnati. Charlotte perhaps believed her mentally and emotionally unstable daughter would come to realize she wasn’t meant to live among people who didn’t understand her problems. As Holly steps inside she thinks again, Museum exhibit. There should be a sign saying HABITAT OF A SAD GIRL, TRISTIS PUELLA.

That her mother loved her Holly still has no doubt. But love isn’t always support. Sometimes love is taking the supports away.

Over the bed is a poster of Madonna. Prince is on one wall, Ralph Macchio as the Karate Kid on another. If she looked on the shelves below her tidy little sound system (Ludio Ludius, the little sign would say), she’d find Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, Wham!, Tina Turner, and of course the Purple One. All on cassettes. The tartan coverlet, which she always hated, is on the bed. Once there was a girl who lived among these things, and looked out the window at Bond Street, and played her music, and wrote her poems on a blue portable Olivetti typewriter. What followed the typewriter was a Commodore PC with a tiny screen.

Holly looks down and sees she is holding those red tags with SAVE printed on them. She can’t even remember picking them up.

“I’m glad I came here,” she says. “It’s wonderful to be home.”

She goes to the Star Wars wastebasket (Bella Siderea, the little sign would say—how the old Latin comes back) and drops the tags into it. Then she sits down on the bed with her hands clasped between her thighs. So many memories here. The question is simple: face or forget?

Face, of course, and not because she’s a different person now, a better person, a courageous person who has faced horrors most people wouldn’t believe. Face because there is no other choice.

After her breakdown, after the so-called “treatment center,” Holly answered an ad from a small publisher who wanted to hire an indexer for a series of three doorstop-sized books about local history written by a Xavier University prof. She was nervous when the interview began—scared stiff, more like it—but the editor, Jim Haggerty, was so obviously at sea when it came to indexing that Holly was able to tell him how she’d proceed without stuttering and getting all tangled up in her own words, as she had so often in her high school classes. She said she would first create a concordance, then make a computer file, then categorize and alphabetize. After that the work would go back to the author, who would vet, edit, and return it to her for any final changes.

“I’m afraid we don’t have a computer just yet,” Haggerty said, “only a few IBM Selectrics. Although I suppose we’ll have to get one—wave of the future, and all that.”

“I have one,” Holly said. She sat forward, so excited by the possibilities that she forgot this was a job interview, forgot Frank Jr., forgot about going through four years of high school known as Jibba-Jibba.

“And you’d use it for indexing?” Haggerty looked bemused.

“Yes. Take the word Erie, for instance. That’s a category, but it can refer to the lake, the county, or to the Erie Native American tribe. Which would have to be cross-referenced with Cat Nation, of course, and Iroquois. Even more! I’d have to go over the material again to get a handle on that, but you see the way it works, right? Or wait, take Plymouth, that’s a really interesting one—”

Haggerty stopped her there and told her she could have the job on spec. He knew an index-nerd when he saw one, Holly thinks as she sits on the bed.

That first job, an earn-while-you-learn situation if ever there was one, led to more indexing jobs. She moved out of the house on Bond Street. She bought her first car. She upgraded her computer and took more classes. She also took her pills. When she was working, she felt bright and aware. When she wasn’t, that sense of living in a cellophane bag returned. She went on a few dates, but they were clumsy, awkward affairs. The obligatory kiss goodnight too often made her think of Frank Jr.

When the indexing work ran thin (the publisher of the doorstop history books went broke), Holly worked for the local hospitals, which were loosely affiliated, as a medical transcriptionist. To this she added claims filing for Cincinnati District Court. There were the obligatory visits home, more of them after the death of her father. She listened to her mother complain about everything from her finances to the neighbors to the Democrats who were ruining everything. Sometimes on these visits Holly thought of a line from one of the Godfather movies: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. At Christmas, she and her mother and Uncle Henry sat on the couch and watched It’s a Wonderful Life. Holly wore her Santa hat.

Time to go.

Holly gets up, starts to leave the room, hears her mother’s imperative voice (Leave it like you found it—how many times have I told you?), and goes back to smooth out the tartan coverlet. For who? A woman who is dead? It’s one of those laugh-or-cry situations, so Holly laughs.

I’m still hearing her. Will I be hearing her forever?

The answer is yes. To this day she won’t lick frosting from the beaters (you can get lockjaw that way), she’ll wash her hands after handling paper money (nothing so germy as a dollar bill), she won’t eat an orange at night, and she’ll never sit on a public toilet seat unless absolutely necessary, and then always with a frisson of horror.

Never talk to strange men, that was another one. Advice Holly followed until meeting Bill Hodges and Jerome Robinson, when everything changed.

She starts for the stairs, then thinks of the advice she gave Jerome about Vera Steinman, and goes down the hall to her mother’s room. There’s nothing she wants here—not the framed pictures on the wall, not the clutter of perfumes on the dresser, not any of the clothes or shoes in the closet—but there are things she should get rid of. They’ll be in the top drawer of the night table next to Charlotte’s bed.

On the way, she diverts to the wall where the framed pictures form a kind of gallery. There are none of Charlotte’s late (and not much lamented) husband, and only one of Uncle Henry. The rest are mother-and-daughter photos. Two in particular have caught Holly’s eye. In one she’s about four, wearing a jumper. In the other she’s nine or ten, wearing the kind of skirt that was all the rage back then: a wraparound with a showy gold safety pin to hold it closed. In her bedroom she hadn’t been able to remember why she hated the coverlet, but now, looking at these pictures, she understands. Both the jumper and the skirt are tartans, she had blouses that were tartan, and (maybe) a sweater. Charlotte just loved tartans, would dress Holly and exclaim, “My Scottish lassie!”

In both pictures—in almost all of them—Charlotte has an arm slung around Holly’s shoulders. Such a gesture, a kind of sideways hug, can be seen as protective or loving, but looking at it repeated over and over in photographs where Charlotte’s daughter progresses from two to sixteen, Holly thinks it can convey something else as well: ownership.

She goes to the night table and opens the top drawer. Mostly it’s the tranquilizers she wants to get rid of, and any prescription pain meds, but she’ll take everything else as well, even the Every Woman’s multi-vites. Flushing them down the commode is a no-no, but there’s a Walgreens on the way back to the Interstate, and she’s sure they’ll be happy to dispose of them for her.

She’s wearing cargo pants with voluminous pockets, which is fortunate; she won’t have to go back downstairs to get a gallon-sized Baggie from the rickrack drawer. She begins stuffing the bottles into her pockets without looking at the labels, then freezes. Beneath her mother’s pharmacy is a stack of notebooks she remembers well. The top notebook has a unicorn on the cover. Holly takes them out and thumbs through one at random. They are her poems. Terrible limping things, but each one from the heart.

Even though she’s by herself, Holly can feel her cheeks heating up. This stuff was written years ago, it’s the juvenilia of an untalented juvenile, but her mother not only kept it, but kept it close by, possibly reading her daughter’s bad poetry before turning out the light. And why would she do that?

“Because she loved me,” Holly says, and the tears start, right on cue. “Because she missed me.”

If only that were all. If not for the crying and wailing about the dastardly Daniel Hailey. She had sat at the kitchen table of this house on Lily Court while Charlotte and Henry explained how they had been gulled. There had been much breast-beating. There had been stationery and spreadsheets. Charlotte must have told Henry what they would need to convince Holly of their lie and Henry had supplied it. He had gone along, as he always did with Charlotte.

Holly thinks that if Bill had been at that family meeting, he would have seen through the deception almost at once. (Not a deception, a con, she thinks. Call it what it was.) But Bill hadn’t been there. Holly should have seen through it herself, but she was new at the game then, and in spite of the dizzying amount they were talking about—a seven-figure amount—she hadn’t really cared. She had been absorbed in her new love of investigation. Besotted, in fact. Not to mention blinded by grief.

If I had investigated my own family instead of hunting for lost dogs and chasing bail-jumpers, things might have been different.

So on and so on.

Meanwhile, what will she do with the notebooks, those embarrassing relics of her youth? Maybe keep them, maybe burn them. She’ll make that decision after the case of Bonnie Rae Dahl is either wrapped up or just peters away to nothing, as some cases do. But for now…

Holly puts them back where they came from and slams the drawer shut. On her way out of the room, she looks at the pictures on the wall again. She and her mother in each one, no sign of the mostly absent father, most with her mother’s arm around her shoulders. Is that love, protectiveness, or an arresting officer’s come-along? Maybe all three.

Halfway down the stairs, the pockets of her cargo pants bulging with pill bottles, Holly has an idea. She hurries back to her room and yanks the tartan coverlet off the bed. She balls it up and carries it downstairs.

In the living room is an ornamental hearth containing a log that never burns because it’s really not a log at all. It’s supposed to be gas-fired but hasn’t worked in years. Holly spreads the coverlet on the hearth, then goes into the kitchen for a trashcan-sized plastic bag from under the sink. She shakes it out as she walks to the front hall. She sweeps all the ceramic figurines into the bag and takes them into the living room.

The money is still all there. Holly has to give her mother that much. Even her trust fund—the part Holly threw into the so-called investment opportunity—is still there. She feels sure her mother bought the jewelry out of her own share of the inheritance, but that doesn’t change the fact that her mother’s only reason for making up the whole thing was so Finders Keepers would fail. Would die a crib death. Then Charlotte could say Oh, Holly. Come and live with me. Stay for awhile. Stay forever.

And had she left a letter? An explanation? Justifications for what she’d done? No. If she’d left such a letter with Emerson, he would have given it to her. It all hurts, but maybe that hurts the most: her mother didn’t feel any need to explain or justify. Because she had no doubt that what she had done was right. As she felt that refusing to be vaccinated against Covid was right.

Holly begins throwing the figurines into the fireplace, really heaving them. Some don’t shatter, but most do. All the ones that hit the not-log do.

Holly doesn’t take as much pleasure from this as she expected. It was more satisfying to smoke in a kitchen where smoking had always been verboten. In the end she dumps the rest of the figurines from the trash bag onto the coverlet, picks up a few shards that have escaped the fireplace, and bundles the coverlet up. She hears the pieces clinking inside and that does give her a certain grim pleasure. She takes the coverlet around to the garbage hutch on the side of the house and stuffs it into one of the cans.

“There,” she says, dusting her hands. “There.”

She goes back into the house, but with no intention of circling through all the rooms. She’s seen what she needs to see and done what needs to be done. She and her mother aren’t quits, will never be quits, but getting rid of the figurines and the coverlet was at least a step toward prying that come-along hold from around her shoulders. All she wants from 42 Lily Court are the papers on the kitchen table. She picks them up, then sniffs the air. Cigarette smoke, thin but there.

Good.

Enough of memory lane; there’s a case to chase, a missing girl to be found. “A new millionaire jumps in her car and drives to Upsala Village,” Holly says.

And laughs.